


Control

by crossingwinter



Series: ASOIAF Drabbles & Ficlets [13]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-24 23:40:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1621205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do you ever just lose control?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Control

Do you ever just lose control?  Like, not in the rage sense, or in the world falling part at the seams sense.  Those aren’t really losing control.  Not really.  Not in the way that I mean, at least.

I lost control, you see.  I lost control at the wrong moment, and made a promise I wish I hadn’t kept but I did because the world was a whole lot bigger than I thought it was and I wanted to see it, wanted to live it and breathe it and feel it and fuck it.

He was married.  He had children.  But he offered me freedom, offered me escape and how couldn’t I take it? Why wouldn’t I take it?

It’s hard to describe.  It all sounds like I knew what I was doing, like I knew how it would all end up, that I thought it was a good idea at the time. But the thing is, I didn’t. There was some part of me that knew it was wrong, immoral on so many counts, but that part of me was nothing at all compared to the screaming of that I didn’t want to marry Robert Baratheon.

That’s what losing control is—when your mind attacks itself and you can’t hear the parts of yourself that you know to be true. I’ve been called impulsive. That’s what my father called me when I was growing up.  I think he didn’t know what to make of me. I think that he thought that calling me impulsive was easier than anything else.  Impulses are something that can be controlled, should be controlled.  In time, as I grew, as I learned what it meant to be ladylike, I would learn how to control these impulses and I would, with time, be everything that he thought I should be.  But the thing is, impulse is instinct.  Losing control isn’t.  Impulse is a reaction. Losing control is a consequence, though of what I don’t know.

I’ve never really known.  I don’t know what made me this way. I don’t know why. Father has compared me to his mother sometimes.  She, apparently, used to lose control too.  She would shout a lot, he said, and dance and sing and fly into furies at the drop of a hat, and then, a month later, she would weep profusely, she would be unable to drag herself from bed, she would only ever talk about death, how she wanted to die, how life was unbearable.

Life is and always has been unbearable. That’s what it is when you don’t have control.  Because why would you think that it was something good, when it wasn’t?  Optimism has never made sense to me, not truly.

Maybe that’s why I went?  There was something optimistic in that moment, some glimmer of hope that this would be the end of it, that maybe if I left home, struck out on my own, I would be able to build something for myself that wouldn’t leave me feeling voiceless in my own mind.  Rhaegar promised me a lot of things.  I can’t remember them all now.  I never remember everything when I am flying. Details are meaningless when I’m excited because what do details matter, really?  What are they for if not to weigh you down when the world is more than alive, it is oozing energy—out of trees, and armor, and the skin of the horse underneath me.  Details are for now, when I realize that I have lost control again and need to pick up the pieces, sort through the shattered world and find what moments I can string together in the hopes that this time, I won’t be under for as long.

I know I’ll be under for a good long while this time. I know I will. Here—let’s try it this way. I know it from the way that when I wake up the world all seems grey, even though the sunlight is bright outside my window and their cloaks are white, and the mountains are red and there are pink and yellow and red and white flowers growing in the garden. I know in my mind that they are those colors, but I don’t see them.  Everything is dull and grey to me, and I wonder if I can remember deep purple eyes and or even the red of the leaves in the Godswood back home. Even in my memory, they seem grey.

Grey is the worst color.  It is absence, it is decay, and that’s what the world is most of the time.  Grey grey grey and boring and dull and lifeless.  It’s strange looking in the mirror every day of your life and seeing grey staring back out of your own face, grey and empty and you notice it before you notice whether or not your lips are red and there’s a moment of fear that today is the day the world will lose all its color again.

Maybe I went because I saw purple and white and black and red and blue and not just those colors—violet and silver and obsidian and scarlet and sapphire—not just colors but intense colors, colors like you don’t realize unless you’ve been living too long in grey—sprouting through the grey. Probably not.  I probably went because I couldn’t not go, because not going would show control and I was beyond control at that point.

That was always the difference between me and Brandon. Brandon knew the limits and broke them on purpose.  Me—I didn’t see the limits until they were past gone and I realized I’d left them behind when I wasn’t paying attention because how can you pay attention when the world is so full of life and the brooks sound like music and the birdsong sounds like prayer?  That’s not the time for limits, that’s not the time for consequences.  Consequences can’t exist when the world is full of magic and you get to see it yourself.  The one time that I did know the limit and break it on purpose was the time I ran off, and was that really knowing the limit? I forgot it so quickly—after I had gone off.  It was easy to forget that I was supposed to have done something else, that I had chosen this path when I could really see the silver speckled blue above me and know that it was _blue_. 

There were other good things about going—not just the color, not just the fast horse he gave me or the Southron scents in my nose. There were other things too. Things that didn’t matter as much, even though to the world they probably mattered the most.  Things like freedom—because it’s hard growing up hearing everyone say that a woman’s lot is to serve.  I didn’t want to serve.  I wanted to ride fast and scream to the stars and be more than my name. Or love—I suppose I loved him, or the idea of him at least. I didn’t really know him. He was so distant, all the time distant, musing over things far away from me.  And it didn’t matter because I was free and the world was full of colors so what did it matter?  He was showing me the world, the reds of Dorne and the greens of the Stormlands—a different green than the greens of Winterfell. Lighter, lusher, with greater texture because when the wind blew the leaves seemed to shiver silver for a moment, and have you ever seen that?  Green shimmering silver?  That’s better than anything in the world.

He left me here, you know?

He left me here—telling me that he had to ride north, but that he would be back for me soon.  Back for us soon.  He didn’t tell me why he was going, but then again, he didn’t tell me much of anything.  He didn’t even tell me when Brandon died.  He let Ser Arthur tell me, let Ser Arthur comfort me as I realized the world had gone grey and shattered and he was probably going to die and leave me with a son who was too much like me and not enough like him and oh oh oh what had I done?


End file.
